Not even Loren Pierce's railing commentary on the pastor's introduction of an outlandish word like "epitome" -- clearly forbidden by the Discipline's injunction to plain language understood of the people -- availed to sap the satisfaction of the majority.

Epicycles worked on paper, sort of, but they did a much better job at keeping astronomers respectable and their models intact than at describing the actual movements of heavenly bodies; they have come to be known as the epitome of bad science.

I pronounced this as three syllables, ep-ee-tome, rhyming with roam, for far longer than I care to admit. A consequence of meeting words in print long before one ever hears them in conversation. The wrong pronunciation was immediately gleefully adopted by everyone else in the family and is still the one we use when talking among ourselves. As far as I can determine, other people may not have families quite as warped as mine, but a lot of folks admit to having had some initial difficulty in pronouncing epitome.